Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher

by Vardis Fisher

  “Dog my hide,” said Bill, staring. “We had it figgered you wuz dead and tuk. We bin awful oneasy. Have ye heerd they are callin ye The Terrer?”

  “Hadn’t heard that,” Sam said, dismounting. He was looking round him when back in a recess he saw Zeke Campbell squinting at him. Zeke, Sam had no doubt, was the most taciturn man in the world; he had seen him a dozen times and had never heard him utter a dozen words. His usual affirmative was an almost inaudible grunt; his negative was a cold stare through the smoke from his pipe. In size and strength and agility he was only average. The most unusual thing in his appearance, for Sam anyway, was his hair; his beard so completely covered his face that only the forehead and the small green eyes were visible. Zeke even had hair all the way down the bridge of his nose. His hair was of a bronze color; when it was full of sunlight the man’s face looked hidden behind a thicket of golden wires.

  “How are you, Zeke?” Sam said. Zeke grunted.

  Bill said, “I smell selfer.” He came up to Sam and breathed iu. “I spect ye’ve bin in the bilins,” he said.

  “How’s trapping?” Sam said.

  At once Bill looked downcast. Soon a man would starve to death, without he dug his fingernails off, and even then he would get ganter and ganter. Between him and Zeke they had only about five packs, though they had worked like two coons climbing greased poles.

  Any extra tobacco?

  Wall now, they did have plenty of that. Bill went to a hidden cache and returned with a few inches of twist. “Fill yer pipe, Sam, and rest yer hinder. Tell us what ye have been up to in the

  bilins.”

  This evening Bill cooked a supper of lean elk roast, beaver tail, muskrat broth, and coffee; and after the men had eaten and filled their pipes they sat by a loud-talking fir-and-cedar fire and wondered aloud about this and that.

  “I wunner,” Bill said, “about ole George.” He meant Bear Paws Meek. George had gone into the Bear Paws Mountains, all alone, smack dab into the middle of Blackfeet country. Was George tired of life?

  George was a smart coon, Sam said.

  “Many’s the smart coon ended up in the pot,” Bill said. “He might as well a-set down at Three Forks and blowed his bull whistle, I figger George is gone under, I shorely do.”

  He doubted that, Sam said. George had been up that way twice before and had come back.

  Bill scratched through his thick hair to his unwashed skull. He and Zeke, he said, had had a close shave last fall. In fact, two. One was the Cheyennes. Zeke was up Bull Elk Creek on a trapline and Bill had just brought in a fine buck and was skinning it when suddenly four red devils appeared out of nowheres, with so much grease and coal dust smeared over their faces that at first Bill had thought they were niggers; but his second glance saw their headdress, his third, the scalps. Wall, doggone it, if there was one thing the whiteman knew he must not do in such a situation it was to reach for his gun. Bill said he was bent over, with skinning knife, and he just remained bent over and let the knife fall, his mind wondering how he could warn Zeke. As sure as varmints Zeke at any moment would come back and walk right into his own funeral. Bill broke off in the story, filled his lungs with strong tobacco fumes, and exploded smoke from two hairy nostrils. His mind, he said, was thinking like a horse loping but there was nothing in it. He had never had such an empty mind in all his born life. He knew, of course, that the red killers were asking theirselves if he was alone or it mebbe two or three men were back in the brush looking torstthem. “I tell ye I was plum scairt, I shorely wuz.”

  He figgered, Bill said, that his hump fat was as good as gone.His rifle was six feet from him; his revolvers were hanging over a limb not far from his rifle; and his knife lay at his feet. He was trying to remember some prayer to say when suddenly there was an explosion that sounded like the bursting of twenty rifle barrels. The redman closest to Bill fell almost on top of him but Bill didn’t wait around to see if the varmint was down for good. In the instant he heard the shot he knew that Zeke had let daylight into the soul of one of them; in the next instant he had plunged his knife into the belly of another; and in the third instant the other two took to their heels like antelope in a high wind. They kallated that a hull war party had descended on them. Zeke had had time to reload and he dropped the third. The fourth then took to wings and when they last saw him he was ten miles above the Tetons. Their other close shave was with two Crows, Bill guessed that these two had it figgered that he was The Terrer, for at the moment when they came in sight of him he was standing on the humped back of a log in a beaver pond and looked a foot taller than he was. He guessed that one or both of them belonged to the twenty the old chief had chosen to bring in Sam’s topknot and ears. They had him dead to rights, for like the fool he had been ever since he left his mother’s knee, he had stood his rifle against a tree and had gone toad-hopping from log to log, looking for a floater stick that would show where a beaver trap was hiding in the deep water below. It was Zeke who again saved his life.

  Through a cloud of smoke Sam looked over at Zeke. Though safer in pairs, the mountain men usually trapped alone. A lone trapper never for a moment put his rifle more than a few inches from his grasp. But no matter how wary they were they died violent deaths, one by one, year after year: there was never a rendezvous, at Pierre’s Hole, or Brown’s, or Laramie or Union or Bent, that they did not look round them to see which faces were missing. Bill was now looking at Sam. He guessed Sam knew that he had killed five, mebbe, six, of the twenty sent out to take him, and that the others were waiting for him to come out of Colter’s bilins. He had heard from Charley that these braves had met in a secret powwow and had cast lots to see which of them would have the first chance at the Terrer’s scalp. The lot had fallen to Eagle Beak.

  “Don’t reckon I ever heard of him,” Sam said.

  Wall now, if you put a few rattlesnakes, a wolverine, a bitch wolf, a falcon hawk, and a nest of hornets in a pot and stirred them well and then pulled out an Injun, it would be the one who had sworn to cut off Sam’s ears and scalp, and cut out his liver, before the first currants were ripe. Charley said Eagle Beak had slain two Blackfeet before he was old enough to know what a woman was for.

  “The first currants are ripe about July,” Sam said.

  There, was a long silence. Zeke puffed his old smelly pipe and stared at Sam under two brows that looked as tough as bedstraw. Bill was also studying the Minard countenance.

  Where was he headed for? Bill asked at last.

  The Musselshell, Sam said.

  In Bill’s mind was a map of the route Sam probably would take—the path up Dog Creek and then over to Buffalo Fork; from there over to the Du Noir and up it to the South Fork and down it all the way to the Bighorn. He would then be south of the Musselshell at its big bend. Still, Bill reflected, sucking into his lungs a mankilling mixture of strong old tobacco and kinnikinic, Sam might not take the well-worn way, knowing that killers were on his trail. As likely as not he would go over to the Badlands and ride right through Wind River Valley.

  “Wonder if she lived through the winter,” Sam said.

  Bill said he had taken a fresh head and put it on one of the stakes, for he figgered that fresh sign of the whiteman’s hatchet might be good medicine. She had acted awful disarted and skeared but she allus had. When he rode up early one morning she was gathering wild-flower seeds. He had talked to her but she had paid no heed and she hadn’t tried to pint her gun at him or anything. Did Sam kallate ever to figger her out?

  “I don’t kallate l’ll ever figger any woman out.”

  How woman, made of man’s rib, could be so different was a riddle; old Bill Williams, he said a woman’s breast was like the hardest rock and there was no trail on it that he could find. This crazy woman’s breast seemed to be all butter. Any woman’s was, Sam said, for her children.

  “And fer nuthin else, I guess. And white gals, they’re too much like pictures.”

  “I reckon,” Sam said, quietly smoking.

&nb
sp; “Ever heerd hide or hair uv her husbun?”

  “Heard he was alive but I doubt it.”

  That was Abner Back, Bill said. Abner said the husband had escaped and was on the warpath; Crazy Bode, that was what they were calling him, a terror as bald as Lost-Skelp, hiding somewhere by the Great Falls. Sam had taken from a leather pouch a note pad and a pencil; he said he wanted Bill to write a letter for him to the Crows.

  “Doggone it, Sam, I can’t write. You knowed that. But what’s on your mind anyhow?”

  Sam said he wanted the rest of the braves to come on, so they could get it over with. He would send them a few choice insults. With note pad and poised pencil Sam waited. Wall now, Bill said, he might think of one or two he had learned. Bill spoke the syllables and Sam wrote them down. The first one said: Ba wara pee-x-ee buy-em. As nearly as he had been able to tell, Bill said, that one meant, “Once in a while I’ll cut your balls off.”

  If that was what it meant, Sam said, it was almost enough in itself; most men seemed to be horribly sensitive to an attack on that part of them. Did he have another one as good’?

  Bill searched a mind that since he came west had paled under the snows of many winters. Why didn’t Sam say, simply, that he intended to wipe them out one by one, or in litters and batches, and send their topknots to the Blackfeet? That was fine, Sam said; how did he spell it out?

  After Bill had pronounced the words over and over Sam had this on his note pad: Dee wappa weema sicky hay keeokoh. He said there seemed to be a lot of pa and ma in that one, and gave the paper to Bill, who could give it to Charley when he saw him, and ask him to read it to the hull nation.

  Bill said it all reminded him of a Mormon. This fool from a wagon train of greenhorns had taken his holy book and a man to interpret, and had gone to the Cheyennes to make Mormons of them. Seems the Mormons believed the red people were one of the lost tribes of Jews, or something like that, and this preacher went over to tell them the good news. A fool of uncommon size, he stood on a tree stump facing three hundred warriors, their hair glistening with buffler fat, his face boyish and simple and rosy-red; and he told these red devils that they were lost Jews whose ancestors millions of moons ago had somehow crossed to South America. He told them they would all go down to hell and fry in hump fat eternally if they didn’t wash off their war paint and come every Sunday to hear Brigham Young preach the gospel. What then happened to that pore greenhorn was enough to make white women give up having babies. He was tuk away and spitted and roasted like a goose, and his holy book’s leaves made some of the brightest flames in the fire.

  The Indians didn’t look like Jews, Sam said.

  “They shorely don’t,” Bill said.

  “I thought their chief belief was a lot of wives.”

  Wall now, Jim Bridger he had talked to Brigham; he said Mormons were a special people, like the Jews once were. Sam said he reckoned all people thought they were special people.

  After trapping with Bill and Zeke for two weeks Sam said he guessed he would be gone, to see if Eagle Beak wanted a hugging match. He would leave his packhorses and pelts with them, and if his topknot was lifted out yonder, Zeke and Bill could have the pelts and horses. When Sam turned to leave, the emotion in Bill was running deep. He managed to say at last, “I figger ya jist hafta git it over with.”

  “For them,” said Sam dryly. He mounted the bay and turned for a moment to say goodbye. Zeke and Bill stood side by side, looking at him.

  “Watch your topknots,” Sam said, and raised his right hand in a goodbye salute.

  “Watch yourn,” Bill said. He felt like crying a little.

  Zeke was silent.

  20

  SAM HAD so abandoned himself to a delightful winter of hot baths, hot meals, mountain climbing, music, and deep sleeps that his wariness was not what it had been. He made a conscious effort to shake himself out of his notion that all was well, and to realize, after entering the Wind River desolation, that he was in Crow country and was a hunted man in the lands of five nations and ten thousand enemies. In Crow villages the squaws were still gouging themselves with sharp flints and wailing at the heavens, because of the dead braves The Terror had slain. What a day it would be for Sam Minard if he ever fell (wounded perhaps) into the clutch of the Crow women! How they would spit their mucus in his face and empty their bladders and bowels over him! There was nothing the inflamed and shrieking lunatics would not do; they would hack testicles off, tiny piece by piece; dig eyes out with sharpened hawthorn sticks; skewer the end of a tongue and pull it out and slice it off in thin slices; run knife points along gums where they met the teeth, and slice the gums down and back—the frightfulness of their cruelties and obscenities, said those who had been captured and had escaped, could be known only to those who had suffered them. Sam was telling himself these things. Were these human females and mothers? It made a man look back to his own mother and wonder if he had ever really known her. He did not intend to he taken alive. He had told Bill that, and Bill had filled his pipe and said that a lot of men said they would never be taken alive but had been taken. If they took a man by surprise and he found a ride barrel against his back, or if he looked up from his supper or his skinning to see a dozen warriors with drawn bows or knives, hope would rape his mind and paralyze his will, and he would surrender and begin to pray for escape.

  Sam rode straight into the heart of Crow country, his thoughts now and then leaping into the north, where the bones of his wife and child were in a cold cairn and a woman sat by two graves. Before long now he would travel only by night; his camps would be fireless and his food cold, until he reached the Yellowstone. His sole task in the next few days was to leave his mark across Crow country.

  It was his seventh day out after leaving Bill and Zeke. He was riding along Wind River Canyon when he came to large hot springs just north of Owl Creek Mountains. He wanted a hot bath, but knowing that he would be a fool to linger here a moment, he headed north and east to the foothills of the Bighorns. The desolate country he was now crossing would become, before many years passed, the site of famous battles between redmen and white.

  He rode through the late afternoon and the dusk and most of this night, never for a moment doubting that he was being trailed. Now and then he turned abruptly off the path and hid, hoping to surprise his enemy. But this Crow was not to be tricked. Maybe it was Eagle Beak or maybe it was Night Owl. Sam didn’t like it at all: he had allowed himself to be outmaneuvered, for he was now in eroded hill-country, with steep ravines, deep washouts, grotesque stone bluifs: there were countless places where an enemy could hide and look across sights at him—from a ridge, a pile of stones, a cave, a few stunted trees. He was reminded of an old mountain man’s words: “When ye is trailed in open country ride backwards, then ye can see what’s behind ye and yer horse will see what’s ahead.” His gaze searching the landscape in pale moonlight, Sam told himself he had better get out of here. He had been across this part of the Wind River desolation only once before and was not familiar with it; in the north he could see piles of mountain or of cloud, but to the east or west he could see only the fantastic wastelands carved by winds and water. The ground was so stony and pitted that he would risk his horse if he tried to outrun a foe; and there were no good places where he could hide and wait.

  It was about two hours before daylight. He had just ridden up out of a ravine and reached the crest of a hill when he felt the sudden sledge-hammer blow of it. In that fraction of a moment he knew all that any man could have known about it—that he had been shot and the bullet had gone through him, or the bullet had smashed his rifle, or had struck the carved hawthorn handle of the Bowie. In that split instant he reached a decision that was practically reflex action: dropping the bridle reins, he pitched forward, headfirst, like a man shot from his horse; but it was a planned falling. His horse would stand against great provocation when the reins were down. His life, he knew, would depend on his lying in such a position that he could see, if with no more than t
he corner of one eye, the bay’s head. Against an unseen foe who could be no more than a hundred or two hundred yards away this looked like the best of his chances. And so in the moment of striking the earth and sprawling on it Sam flung himself half around, so that with his left eye he could look up at the bay and watch the signals. They would be better signals than those of kildeer or redwinged blackbird. To anyone standing in the area and looking over at him he appeared to be a man who had plunged headfirst off his horse and was now dead or unconscious. Both hands were under his lower ribs, by design, one on the right, the other at the left of his breastbone, with palms outspread against the earth; his rump was humped up a few inches, as though he had jackknifed; his head was jammed back between his shoulders and turned down to one side. One leg lay straight out, the other at a right angle against it. His mind in these few moments had been working at lightning speed.

  He knew now that a Crow who was a master of stealth had flanked him on the right and a little ahead of him; and out there, laying his gun across a stone or a hummock, had taken steady aim at Sam Minard’s torso and tired. Since Sam had almost instantly pitched off like a mortally wounded man the Indian would have little doubt that he had shot him through; but on approaching he would be as wary as the wolf. He might wait half an hour before making a move. But Sam was fairly comfortable and full of ironic contempt for himself: what an idiot a man was when he hung guns around his belly and thought he was safe! Because his self-esteem had suffered such a shock he told himself that he might catch a few winks of sleep while the red devil was deciding whether his enemy was dead or feigning. The bitter flashes of mirth came and went in him, for he knew that he stood a good chance to be dead within an hour. There might be a dozen Indians out there. Or if there was only one he might come within a hundred feet of Sam and shoot him again. He was not so sure now that his pitching off headlong had been the best plan; it might have been better to have made a run for it, though in that case the Indian would have shot his horse from under him. If it was a brave not fully seasoned in battle he would not shoot a second time; as softly as the wolf he would approach, step by step, gun reloaded, knife drawn; or in his deadly soundless way he might approach with only tomahawk in one hand, knife in the other. He would not know that Sam was watching the head of the bay, or that the movements of eyes, ears, and the whole face would tell him as surely as Sam’s own eyes could have done the moment the Indian left his hiding place and started forward. The bay’s eyes, his ears, his nostrils, the position of his head, and the visible sensation through his whole body would tell Sam in every moment what the redman was doing and how close he was.